Well done for posting this and reporting it. I hope the vet got there in time. The animals are nothing if not survivors, I remember documentaries showing wild dogs recovering from what looked like terminal injuries. Fingers crossed.
Alan

Super Colleen. I'm in the land of the bald eagle at the moment. On Vancouver Island where they are everywhere, but I only managed one half decent shot. I'll post it when I get the chance. Your fish eagle is magnificent - I've only ever seen two one in captivity in Nigeria and the other in Sabi Sands SA. I didn't get anything as good as this.

To me the old, "Is photography art?" question is long dead. In the UK we seem to be among the last to even ask the question. Photography is undoubtedly art. It always has been. Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton used standard artist poses and she certainly amended the light to suit. To me photographic art requires more attention to detail than painting. We can of course to-day remove trees from scenes, something that was hard to do with film, but Constable simply ignored trees he didn't want in his paintings. Our compositions can't easily be painted over and whether with landscape or models bad composition can't easily be corrected.

You also ask about post processing and is the image still a photograph. Well, of course it is, except when it's trying not to be. It maybe ceases to be if one takes processing to a level where the treatment purports to be something else. Your second image is still a photograph.